For a couple of generations, every major presidential candidate, from both parties, has taken the same position on U.S. policy towards Cuba: keep the status quo. The embargo needs to stay in place in order to “keep the pressure” on Fidel Castro. Any thawing in relations would be a victory for a brutal thug, and would enrage a powerful voting bloc (Cuban Americans) in a key electoral state (Florida).
With that in mind, no candidate has been willing to talk openly about a change. I distinctly remember in 2004 when Wesley Clark said in a debate he wanted a dramatic shake-up in the existing policy. “When you isolate a country, you strengthen the dictators in it,” Clark said. The next day, Clark’s campaign backpedaled, after aides heard from supporters in Miami.
This year, to their credit, some Dems are stepping up, challenging the status quo, and staking out a new position. Sen. Chris Dodd was first out of the gates, recently describing the policy of the last 46 years as “misguided.” Dodd added, “We must open the flood gates to contacts with the Cuban people. We must remove restrictions on the ability of Cuban Americans to provide financial assistance to their loved ones. Even small sums of money in the hands of ordinary Cuban families can serve as catalysts for private investment to gain a foothold in Cuba.”
Barack Obama is taking the same risk.
…Obama is leaping into the long-running Cuba debate by calling for the U.S. to ease restrictions for Cuban-Americans who want to visit the island or send money home.
Obama’s campaign said Monday that, if elected, the Illinois senator would lift restrictions imposed by the Bush administration and allow Cuban-Americans to visit their relatives more frequently, as well as ease limits on the amount of money they can send to their families.
“Senator Obama feels that the Bush administration has made a humanitarian and a strategic blunder,” spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in an e-mail. “His concern is that this has had a profoundly negative impact on the Cuban people, making them more dependent on the Castro regime, thus isolating them from the transformative message carried by Cuban-Americans.”
The next question, of course, is whether any of this is going to work, politically.
To clarify, Dodd and Obama aren’t explicitly calling for an end to the embargo. They are, however, talking about changing the policy by reversing Bush’s controversial decisions that made it harder for Cuban Americans to visit their relatives on the island and send money back to Cuba.
Are Dodd and Obama going to pay a steep political price? Maybe not.
Maybe it’s because Obama knows a new conventional wisdom may well be taking shape in the state — one that could actually make his declarations this week an asset when Florida holds its primary election next January. “A democratic opening in Cuba is, and should be, the foremost objective of our policy,” Obama wrote in the Herald. But while making that standard declaration, he also argued that “Cuban-American connections to family in Cuba are not only a basic right in humanitarian terms, but also our best tool for helping to foster the beginnings of grassroots democracy on the island.” As a result, he said, “I will grant Cuban-Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island.”
The restrictions — widely viewed as a thank-you to the hardline exile bloc that helped Bush win Florida in 2000 — allow Cuban-Americans to visit the island for only 14 days every three years and limit remittances to $1,200 per year. “It’s almost as if you have to decide ahead of time when a relative is going to die,” says Miami immigration attorney Magda Montiel Davis, a Cuban-American moderate who says she is now voting for Obama after reading his Herald article. Bush and hard-line leaders insist the policy helps keep U.S. dollars out of Castro’s hands. But “it has also made [Cubans living in Cuba] more dependent on the Castro regime,” Obama argued in the Herald, “and isolated them from the transformative message carried there by Cuban-Americans.”
It doesn’t get a lot of attention, but there’s a big distinction between Cuban exiles who fled to the United States and their children’s generation. The younger Cuban-Americans are far less conservative, and far more open to a policy change. Dodd and Obama are assuming, correctly, that the older generation aren’t going to vote for a Democrat anyway, so why not shake up the dynamic by reaching out with a common-sense policy that has the added benefit of appealing to younger Cuban-American voters?
Miami Democrats like Elena Freyre, a Cuban-American art gallery owner in Little Havana, say they’ve been trying to tell Democratic candidates to stop parroting the hard-line position. “Obama’s people were the first who ever said to me on the phone, ‘Wait, let me get a pen and write that down,'” says Freyre. “He’s the first to have the cojones to say Bush’s policy is wrong, and I think it’s going to wake up a lot of moderate Cuban-American voters.”
Regrettably, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have already defended the status quo and said they oppose any changes to existing policy. John Edwards is open to some changes, but hasn’t gone as far as Dodd and Obama.
For all the talk about finding foreign policy distinctions between the Democratic presidential candidates, here’s a big one waiting for some attention.